CORCORAN, THE MASTER FIXER (& WHO IS SENATOR X?)
Super Tuesday is history. U.S. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts knows that he is the Democratic party's main man.
So can David McKean, Chief of Staff to Senator X and author of a new book on Washington insider Thomas G. Corcoran (Tommy the Cork: Washington's Ultimate Insider from Roosevelt to Reagan, Steerforth Press), now reveal who Senator X is?
The answer is no. The Senate Ethics Committee has asked McKean to withhold the name of Senator X in promoting his book "so as not to create the appearance of using his position in the U.S. government for commercial purposes".
The question is, does the public have a right to know who Senator X is, since Senator X could possibly be the next U.S. president? Getting to the bottom of this seems even more urgent considering what McKean has chosen for the book's themes.
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McKean, has, in fact, has already played a historic role in sorting out the country's financial woes, serving as Investigative Counsel to Senator X on BCCI, with Corcoran's chief rival, Clark Clifford, the star witness.
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However, when Corcoran made the decision to leave government in the 1940s to start a family and make a quick million dollars, McKean shows the golden glow fade. Corcoran would double as lobbyist for United Fruit and point man in helping to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman's Guatemalan government following Arbenz's introduction of land reforms in the 1950s.
In promoting China's Chiang Kai-shek, he would develop a cozy relationship with the CIA (Dulles brothers, Frank Wisner, et al.), which used the fleet of planes Corcoran owned jointly with General Claire Chennault and others -- Civil Air Transport -- for special missions into China and Vietnam. [For enlightenment on these missions, see: Linda Minor's: "Follow The Yellow Brick Road" in Scoop's archives.]
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While Clifford was JFK's man (that's John Fitzgerald Kennedy not John Forbes Kerry), Corcoran was Lyndon Johnson's, first introducing him to FDR and later counseling him to run with Kennedy as vice president in 1960. McKean says Eleanor Roosevelt thought Corcoran was a sexist. And that Bobby Kennedy didn't like him.
Note I'd add to the above: this author describes Corcoran as Lyndon Johnson's man, which was one aspect of his career, but earlier he had also been Joseph Kennedy's ally on the SEC (despite not liking Kennedy personally) and later his lawyer. There's a big story here to be pieced together, I suspect.
Thank you for the excerpts! Indeed, there is much to indicate a deeper connection between these people. Hopefully, a writer will pick up the mantel and publish these connections.